beach dreams

her heart gave out

on the beach

he could not see for dreaming.

eyes exhausted,

legs akimbo.

dreaming.

sandy broken bottles

mixing seaweed to cerveza

cut my calluses underfoot

on a night with no moon.

fragrant bonfire remnants 

drifting afterglow of yesteryear

are no match for the odor

of hospital waste on the tide.

my mind gave out

on the beach

she could not see for dying.

breath deflating,

eyes in wonder.

never more.

50 spins 'round a star

I've ruptured aspirations,

slicing my imagination,

the memories bleeding out

into the last vestiges of summer.

An accidental tripping, stumbling,

crashing into aging,

convulsing on the edges,

cracking wise before the fall.

I've torn asunder wonder

and my civic standing today,

the neighbors - slinking caffeine junkies -

take their sojourn elsewhere.

As the weather turns from August swelter

to September autumn amber,

I wander through my yesteryear book,

making sick upon the page.

She's half gone, slipping softly

through my psyche today,

speaking a language I can't fathom

with a hope that's not named Bob.

That piece of her remaining rains down

hatred dressed as passion,

as I surrender punch drunk

on the wrong side of my needs.

Finally, a steely-eyed truth arises:

50 years of breathing,

knocking me flat back on the floorboards,

staring up at the ceiling looking down.

Bottle Broken '95

I bottle up my terrors

in self-prescribed libations

while drying out the night sweats

on a clothesline called the bar.

I sing the body electric

in a bathtub with a vacuum cleaner

praying that the fuse blows

me straight into the light.

I walk through my conscious laughter

into hazy ragged dreamscapes

of yesteryears gone haywire

and tomorrows not to come.

I huddle half nervously

near the bottle in front of me,

doubting its superiority

to a frontal lobotomy;

still, this kid's shaking safe

in her burning peptic embrace.

everlasting delirium shakes

dripping colors
of sunburned regrets
bleed through my dreams at night,
chased by daylight nightmares
of stumbling stasis
draped down in corporate ruminations
of my albatross.
--



she's always just off-camera,
gone from lost thoughts
out the corner of my eye,
a goth ghost
fondly remembered,
drifting toward existence
only after leaving me behind.
--
meanwhile, foreboding parties
of social grace failings
cut me screaming mute,
as though to peel away
the peptic perspiration
of conversations gone awry,
hemorrhaging reflux like museum wax figures melting.
--
i cling to my precious precipice,
balanced between the glory and the gored,
with my spiritual stupidity
up crevices divine,
twitching 'longing after' glances -
down toward echoes of elation -
at the normalcy i envy ...
--
... wandering giddy
into the warmed over death
of everlasting delirium shakes,
dissolving into the infinite past tenses
of hallucinating happiness,
shooting up idyllic confabulations
laced with imaginary days of yore.

blackened purple, fire of white

I dive into an emptiness,

my soul spent to fill it.

I languish in a mystery

that coats my world in choking smoke.

Her breath rides crystal hot and hard,

my vanquished eyes surrender

a blackened purple aftermath

slicing through my psyche sweetly.

My hope's on fire of white teardrops

torn from words gone silky silent.

Her hatred pure - so singular -

no consequence but gorgeous madness.

I pour myself down drains of light

while all my dreams drown disappearing.

She swims the depths through fear and failure

while all her doldrums die debating.

I haunt the ever twilight tinged

waiting rooms of faceless nightmares

waiting still for an unknown something

and called on yet by nothing, no one.

She and I are all but spent,

bent twisted in a life conspiring

to rip it up all raggedly, senselessly, heavenly -

finally to tear it all down.

-----

Translucent Chains

A child's eye view

of life's possibilities

is light beyond boundaries,

a vision bright as to blind

an adult's perspective

long relegated to the shadows.

---

Slowly the light dims,

the vibrant colors growing flat,

the edges sanding smooth.

---

Countless innocuous admonitions

handed down through generations

form an unseen family heirloom

of dysfunction we all carry inside.

---

Growing.

Choking.

---

Sewing a web

around your dreams

in translucent chains

hiding hideous across

the expanse of your life.

---

Ah, young childhood -

the unfettered joy

of a hot water heater

cardboard box "fort"

or ratty paper kite,

happiness that trumps

the best grown up high

you'll ever have.

---

But it's a drug in itself,

the flame we all chase

our whole adult lives,

whether through workaholism,

or alcoholism,

or religion,

or sex.

---

It's the gift that keeps on giving,

as old as history bestowing

the first vestiges of neuroses upon us

through predators/famine/drought, whatever.

---

Our futile race to taste

the primal pleasure again

unwittingly extinguishes

that very fire in our children,

our own ember doused

from our parents' drab rendition

of this same sad song.

wordshit

I drain

my excess wordshit

onto the pages

of this abyss

lest they abscess

into a volcanic metamorphous

of nonsensical tirades

struggling through the social niceties

that choke

this sweatbox called life.

... meanwhile, a cold wind blows

through drunk town ...

April Gray

It's April gray, 

a morning lost;

one Sunday laced 

with the duped and doped;

a Fool's Day fallen on deaf ears.

It's April gray.

Summer of '74

My hometown blooms

in twilight fading shades of grey

as the summer simmers

and then slips from my mind.

There remains only the house.

The room.

Them.

There, no sunlight penetrates

to disturb this tomb.

The dead don't notice.

But I do.

life, death & the in-betweens

honesty shot through the prism

of a rapier wit,

poetry from laughter and life.

--

life is on the edges,

still we too often cling to the cushioned walls

afraid of death omniscient beyond

while killing ourselves so subtly within.

why does it take the loss

of a loved one to give us pause

in this slow-motion dance of subliminal waste?

--

that fairness not be fair weathered

or kindness out of vogue,

that searching wanderlust go walking with a quiet resolve.

--

that simply to be and be hilarious

might just be the most important,

the most caring,

most healing thing of all.

for Larry, RIP.

coyote smile

It's February lately,

she's April in a hurry.

Lost in a winter

of temperate goodbyes,

I rush to her chilly

but coyote smile.

plumbing supply chain blues

My father danced

from the gallows of life,

a Don Draper swinger

gone to advertising seed.

Should you find yourself in need

of plumbing supplies

or second hand cirrosis

and can wait out a Strand Hotel

bender or two,

come on down to North Everett cira 1969

and darken our door -

my daddy-o, he can oblige;

this hep cat pappy,

with his dad gone mad skills.

Sweet sounds of sickness

and Aqua Velva whiskey fragrance,

deep thrusts of indigestion

and tortured circumspect;

the fury weighed heavy

on this slightly animated corpse

but he'd be glad to help you out

for just a taste

of formaldehyde distilled.

raining afterthoughts

it's raining

afterthoughts before her,

blowing

pissed-off into the wind.


Somewhere Monday

but not yet.

Sometime tomorrow

but not now.

Somehow broken

yet unbowed.

Some things tear

and won't cauterize.

My mind is a patchwork broken,

threaded with cobwebs

and moody medicine,

aching to break clear

just once.


My past is taking on water,

soaked with salt

and nausea's backwash,

passing as nerves

chewed to cheesy bread,

cloaked in this carcass

I call home.

pebbles and petulance

My nose is running

but I'm not.

My head is thick

with thought;

my eyes unsteady

and crossed;

my legs bowed

and bought.

She's up the block

past icy accusations,

dropped off the face

of reconciliation.

I've given up the ghost

of meeting expectations

without a whisper

from that spectre

long since given up on me.

Meanwhile, the alley shimmers

with pebbles and petulance

and me here tonight

trying finally in vain

to soften the edge.

a blinding brace (with squirrels)

My father was but a dark shadow

passing down the hall,

a perpetual winter

onto himself.

My mother was but a blinding brace

of robes and smoke,

a withering wind

blown back hard.

I'm but the seed of misplaced rage

trapped in a past

caught on a half torn tape

spinning in my head,

a nightmare on rewind

I can't bear to eject.

Through it all, the squirrels in my yard

find the pickings pretty slim,

the trees stripped bare,

crying quietly into March

and neither much concerned

about poor, poor pitiful me.

perpetual adolescence

I dream of lithium

and lethargy

as a January

night sweats alone.

I burn gas off a sickness

like cynanide

born from a fever

festering always,

undone with a shrug.

So dawns the 50th anniversary

of the year of my birth,

yet still I get zits

and panic attacks

in this perpetual adolescence

grown oh so very old.